Electronic devices continue to increase in complexity and functionality. This poses several challenges to designers of such devices. For example, it may be difficult to develop and provide an intuitive, functional, and convenient user interface for an electronic device, especially when the device is small in size.
Recently, touch-screen displays have become popular user interfaces for certain electronic devices, such as mobile devices. Touch-screens are especially conducive to mobile devices at least because they allow for an expansive set of user inputs and can replace other limited input interfaces such as dedicated mechanical input buttons. However, there remains room to improve upon standard touch screen interfaces.
A mobile device may provide a number of applications to the user, including telephony applications, organizers, email applications, instant messaging (IM) applications, games, cameras, image viewers, etc. These applications may be launched when a user selects an icon on the touch-screen display to activate the application. The available touch-screen display sizes of many mobile devices may limit the number of icons that can be effectively presented. Existing user interfaces may provide one of a variety of menu formats that group menu items into categories and sub-categories. These user interfaces may require a user to “drill down” through multiple menus to select a desired icon or other item.